Compiling Comp Ling: Practical weighted dynamic programming and the Dyna language

Abstract

Weighted deduction with aggregation is a powerful theoretical formalism that encompasses many NLP algorithms. This paper proposes a declarative specification language, Dyna; gives general agenda-based algorithms for computing weights and gradients; briefly discusses Dyna-to-Dyna program transformations; and shows that a first implementation of a Dyna-to-C++ compiler produces code that is efficient enough for real NLP research, though still several times slower than hand-crafted code.